Religion and public policy

Islam and the European left

Marx, Methodism and Mecca

ACROSS western Europe, parties of the centre-left have struggled to make sense of the fact that Islam is a growing cultural force in their continent. At times, the relationship has veered between close embrace and secularist recoil. But parties of the left will lose out politically unless they can find a way to give Muslims the opportunities to participate in public life that other religious groups already enjoy.

That, in a nutshell, is the argument laid out by Jonathan Laurence, a professor at Boston College, in the latest issue of Dissent, a quarterly journal. As one of the most thoughtful observers of the politics of European Islam, he makes some important, paradoxical points.

When poor immigrants of Muslim heritage started coming to work in Europe's factories half a century ago, they were welcomed by leftist parties as victims to be defended and promising political allies. But the relationship went sour after Muslim migrants showed their traditionalist side: burning the books of Salman Rushdie, the writer whose death was demanded by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and insisting on traditional headgear for women.

The centre-left has an ambivalent attitude to religion in general. It was once said of Britain's Labour party that, although it was a "broad church", it owed more to Methodism than to Marx. But in most other European countries, social-democratic parties have occupied the secularist ground, in opposition to the moderate religious conservatism of the centre-right. When centre-leftist parties have tried to reach out to Muslim voters, they have sometimes been burned by the experience. Earlier this year, a Muslim member of Sweden's Social Democratic party had to quit the leadership after making a reference to attacking Israel.

The paradox grows sharper, as Mr Laurence points out, when you look at voting patterns among Muslim migrants in Europe. In their new homelands, they still generally vote for centre-leftist parties (unless there a strong reason not to, like the Iraq war), but if they remain active in the politics of their mother country, they lean towards Islamist conservatism. The Islamist parties of Turkey and Tunisia do even better in the European diaspora than they do at home, Mr Laurence notes. (He could have added that the Islamists of Bangladesh do better in east London than they do in Dhaka.)

Although his broad-brush analysis of the European scene is clear and persuasive, some readers will part company with Mr Laurence's conclusion. Despite the relationship's inherent problems, he argues, the centre-left may lose out electorally unless it somehow re-engages with Islam. "When the left 'bets against God'....[it] forgoes potential alliances with faith communities that share common moral, economic and social ground."

In Britain at least, it looks likely that the centre-left will continue to swing erratically between cultivating Islam and cultivating wariness of Islam. In recent days Labour's education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, has scored points over the strange goings-on at the Al-Madinah school in Derby, which asked all prospective women teachers, Muslim or otherwise, whether they would be prepared to cover their hair. This establishment, excoriated in an inspectors' report this week, was a perfect example of the flaws in the Conservative-led government's policy of allowing "free schools" with weak supervision: by making that argument, Mr Hunt will please some citizens and alienate others, including Pakistani-born voters who have reacted defensively to criticism of the school. In the confusing, multicultural Europe of 2013, a politician or political party cannot please everybody and perhaps should not try.

I am not one that agrees much with some of your more radical views but I will have to agree this time.

Here in Sweden there are neighborhoods that are not possible for the firemen or even ambulances to go through because the immigrants of Islamic background do not allow them to, creating a state within the state.

It is not hard to hear the drunkards, that are paid by my tax money, calling the younger girls as "prostitutes" and worse things when they pass.

Compound that to the problem that the media and politicians are so scarred of being called racists that hardly we see any reprimand from their part. Just the other week a case where an immigrant was attacked was first blamed on "white supremacists". Just to be removed few hours later when, in fact, the attack was perpetrated by another group of immigrants.

I am all in favor of immigration as long as there is integration and respect of our customs and traditions. I am pretty sure that if I would live in Somalia/Saudi Arabia/etc I could not walk hand in hand with my wife on the streets or my daughters to wear mini-skirts of even drive. The Chilean immigrants, for example, blended so perfectly that it is hard to see them as anything else but as Swedes.

At the same time I blame much of the government mindset of just "bringing" people here and supporting them financially instead of enforcing a more rigid approach of language learning, skill learning and integration. A "preparatory course for immigrants" of all backgrounds and races. If you don't know how to read, we will teach you. If you do not know how to speak the language, we will teach you.

Granted other races, and beliefs, also cause disturbance and it would be ludicrous for me to imply that only muslims create problems but if we continue to ignore the hard facts and just shut our ears to this growing problem we will not have a nice country to live. Not for us and not for the immigrants.

Non-Muslims have plenty of reasons to be concerned and it isn't bigoted nor ignorant to do so. Islam is a fundamentally violent religion (though to be fair, very few people take their holy books literally these days) and quite a bit of violence has been caused by Muslims around the world in an incredibly disproportionate fashion. Many of these Islamic immigrants come from war-torn countries where even the most well-meaning person would find themselves transformed, which only adds to the risk.

And ignoring the religious aspect entirely, virtually all of these immigrants come from lawless, poverty-stricken area of the world and they account for a tremendously disproportionate (5-to-1 or more relative to population) amount of violent crimes in their new countries of residence. Rioting is not uncommon, rape is prevalent, etc.

Of course, there is also the problem of non-assimilation, where immigrants don't even attempt to interact with natives, learn their language, or tolerate their cultural values.

This isn't to say all of these people are bad, nor even that most are. And many of them would add a lot to European countries. But it is not just reasonable, but intelligent to be concerned about mass immigration lest Europe ceases to be European and becomes Middle Eastern instead. One need not have a hateful bone in their body to feel this way.

The dilemma of the left liberals everywhere in the democracies and rulers in authoritarian nations like China, Russia is how to engage with their Muslim populations which demand democracy and secularism in their public interface as minorities with the rest of the society in the midst of which they have to live. Yet within and among their own coreligionists, these Muslims live as if the clock had stopped when their forefathers immigrated. They continue to live in thrall of mullahs and bullies who have arrogated to themselves the "right" to dictate the social mores these Muslims are "allowed" in the societies where they live. Their adopted homelands are described by these self anointed "gate keepers" as heathen, irreligious, sexually deviant, morally decadent, steeped in hedonism and surely on the path of social ruin. They consider at the most benign, as their divine responsibility to "protect" and inoculate their coreligionists through social coercion.

Islam is the most coercive social movement on earth where dissent is heresy, nay blasphemy, punishable by social ostracism or even officially sanctioned murder of the dissenter or the person who is deemed to have brought Islam or Islamic mores to disrepute or brought infamy and dishonor to a family. This self chosen social isolation of Muslims is reciprocated by the Christian, Buddhist or atheistic majority in the societies where they live. This reciprocation takes the form of social avoidance, discrimination at work, suspicion of their "real" intentions and abhorrence of their readiness to resort to violence at any pretext. Their oppression of non Muslims in countries where they are a majority, exposes their pious claims as "model" citizens in democracies or wherever they are in a demographic minority.

Osama bin Laden garnered wide support from educated but disillusioned Muslim youths by exploiting this deep resentment. Osama may be dead but the social conditions that enticed young Muslims to his cause have not disappeared.

The Muslim world is today the most violent. Muslims keep killing other Muslims in ever larger numbers in practically every Muslim majority country. This fratricidal war has given some respite from Islamic terror to the non Muslim world. But, this interregnum could pass. The secular world must be ever vigilant against the spread of Islamic terror into their own neighborhood. It is good that disastrous interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Arab North Africa have chastened the West. The mission to democratize the Muslim has been given up as a lost cause. The secular world can only protect itself from the fallout of malevolent Islam.

Masta Distorted Information, do you imply that in order to form an informed opinion on a mass movement, an ideology, a religion, a doctrine one must meet all the adherents of it? I mean, seriously, man, don't you smoke something too strong for you? Or maybe you do need a stronger medication?
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You suggest a friendly conversation with a Sunni from Egypt, and one from Somalia, and one from Russia, and one from Indonesia... well, the London cops are now talking to one from Algiers, one from Azerbaijan, one from Turkey, and one from Pakistan. You know what is mutual among them? Terrorism.

Is "parties of the centre-left" a new polite term to designate pinko crowd? Quite funny, really. Anyways, the fact that they "struggle" to make sense of one of the results of their own politics - Islam's growing cultural force ("cultural" being another politically correct euphemism for unsavoury practices like female genital mutilation and forced marriages) - is not surprising. Much more strange that they can't force themselves to admit much more grievous consequences of their stalwart policy of mass, unrestrained immigration from the Mohammedan lands. The last weeks' arrests in London of Azeri, Turkish, Pakistani, and Algerian terrorists - all of them "Britons"! - is a vivid though by no means unique illustration of what pinko policies in regard to Moslems lead to.

"Again it astonishes me (though at this point, I'm not sure why) how many people like to caricature Muslims through the smallest sampling they come in contact with"

The 'sampling' that the world bases its opinion of Muslims on is not small. Islamic extremism has been a disproportionate contributor to terrorism across the world in recent decades, and this is merely an echo of the aggressive expansion that Islam had achieved in its infancy.

Most Muslims tend to be just average people, with no ambitions for jihad. But to attribute Islamophobia to racist stereotyping is simplistic.

That's exactly what the Left are trying to do in Europe for more than a hundred years: they attempt to separate European culture and traditions from Christianity; better to say, to purge European souls from Christianity. The result is disastrous: they may achieve what Musselman forces couldn't when they were defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and, after another 150 years, in 1683.
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As far as primitive cultures and Islam are concerned, it's the issue of hen and egg: what was prime - primitive cultures which produced Islam, or Islam which kept those cultures primitive for long ages? And you know what, I don't care. If they like it this way, fine. Just please, and I mean puuu-le-ase! not in our home.

Once upon a time Western European governments considered their societies the apogee of civilised rule, industrial development, and high culture. This became a rationale - the 'Mission civilisatrice' - to justify colonialism.

In light of the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism throughout European societies, perhaps Europe's new collective voice should be redefined as one of warning rather than triumphalism - let's call it the 'Mission disastertrice' - to the rest of the non-Islamic world, especially those East Asian societies where the population is rapidly ageing (and whose governments might feel tempted to grant Muslim workers immigrant or guest worker status).

Message in a bottle, for all you Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese: For goodness' sake, do NOT allow your governments to usher in a policy of Muslim immigration / mass amnesty in the name of secular ideals, multiculturalism, compassion, or economic necessity. Learn from Europe's mistakes and choose another route of your own devising. You're probably clever enough to find one and, when you do, let us know.

Right you are. Just a historical reference: when the first really influential "green" party was founded in then Western Germany in the 1960s, Germans immediately saw it for what it really was and coined a nickname for its members: watermelons. Meaning, thin green layer on the surface and big (politically) red lump inside. Clever people Germans, they are.

Can't say this is a thoroughly informed piece. In France, the main think tank of the ruling Socialist Party created a very explicit policy, dating from 2011-2012, whereby the socialists and other protomarxists should give up on the poor and middle class, and favor immigrants and very specifically muslims. Martine Aubry, of 35-hour week fame, tested the policy with political success in her system-heavy city of Lille. And it worked like a charm during the later 2013 presidential election, where depending on estimates 87% to 93% of muslims voted for the socialists.
Except that, homosexuals aside (since they got marriage rights from the socialists), noone else believes that the socialists and their communists and "green" (really, marxist) allies are trustworthy.

Once again Stands-for-Truth sneaks brazen lies into his indignant, holier-than-thou posts: "pure white Judeo-Christian hinterland" of Europe. Using the mix of old Uncle Jo Stalin's and his namesake's Joseph Goebbels propaganda receipts, huh?
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To begin with, there are Mohammedans of all races - as there are Europeans of all races.
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And if "capitalistic culture" - whatever you mean by this nincompoopery - has no answers to some questions, the "communistic" one has none at all.
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And how about the Musselman culture? Yeah right, here they are the answers: stoning of adulterers and homosexuals, genital mutilation, forced marriage, death punishment for apostasy... continue, you're a specialist in this creed and its cheerleader.

Liberals - i.e. neo-Marxists, i.e. Gramscists, i.e. European equivalent of Saul Alinskyists - don't fight against the immigrants' religious emphasis. They fight against native Christians' religious believes because the whole European society is based on Christianity and is permeated by its notions. The Left are hell bent on destruction of this society, it is their very raison d'etre, that is why they so eagerly allied with the Mohammedan faith and use it as a tool, as a mean to achieve their ends.

The U.S. absorbs many more Arab Christians, victims if not of violent pogroms (as in Egypt) then at least of systematic persecution. The Muslims are doing inordinate damage relative to their population in the U.S., too. It's just that most Americans confuse Arabs with Muslims, and so overestimate the muslim population in their midst.

Right you are once again. And I wouldn't describe the former Army Major Hasan as pissing out from the tent. To the contrary, being admitted right in the middle of it, he shot thirteen of his comrades in arms. Outstanding, but far from unique example. And Cordoba Mosque (deliberately named on Caliphate founded on conquered Christian land) next to Ground Zero, the site of the greatest Mohammedan atrocity on the American soil, amounts to much more than "place at the table". Looks more like a surrender to me.

2. Western democracies become more Islamic and begin to pray towards Mecca.

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***Based on real world human social interactions, I predict there will be a lot more mosques and minarets in Europe cities and villages.
And wine, beer and spirits will be restricted as controlled drugs and 'medical' therapy.

Wrong wrong wrong. They worship Mohammed, seeing as how the Quran and the rules were all written by him and benefit him. He took the pre-existing Christianity and heavily distorted it, and then added his 180 degree shift and wrote that these new rules of violence are the real rules and said it's 'perfect'. And don't perpetuate the God is Allah myth. They are two completely different things, it's simply a Muslim lie to fool non-Muslims. Tell me, if Allah is simply arabic for God, then why would they ever say 'Praise Allah'? Hmmmmm. Mohammed also discredited everything about Christianity in his version and insulting them in the process. Christ said he was the last prophet. so Mo's the false prophet in Revelations. Mo also denounced Christ as seen in Christianity as the Son of God, and made him out to be just a human. Also, note closely how in Islam, 'Allah' only gives his ok *after* all the blood is shed by Mo and his band of raiders.